The Automobile and American Life: Another Twist to the 1930s Autobahnen Origins Story

Saturday, July 20, 2019

Another Twist to the 1930s Autobahnen Origins Story

I am just now sorting my many automotive history files located in my office at the University of Dayton. At present there are eleven piles with two additional big piles of unsorted files yet to go. No telling what I will discover in this rich collection of sources.

As I was looking through the materials, I ran across this article entitled "Just Like Jersey" published in the New Yorker, April 14, 1945 (p.18). The author tells a story I did not include in the 2nd edition of my The Automobile and American Life. Before I get to that, here is my original excerpt on the Autobahnen.

These kind of roads (divided highways) were built in Mussolini’s Italy during the 1920s (the autostrade) and in Hitler’s Germany of the 1930s (the autobahnen).³⁷Adolf Hitler’s highways were dramatically innovative roads that were perhaps the most publicized and visible products of the new regime. They have also proved to be the most enduring of the Third Reich’s material legacies, still carrying traffic, and thus promising to fulfill Hitler’s boast that “the construction of these roads will give the German people traffic routes for the most distant future.” The autobahnenwere critical to Hitler’s plan for the mass motorization of Germany, first announced at the Berlin auto show of 1933. Between 1933 and 1936 auto production increased five times. These roads were also important aspects of Hitler’s plan eliminate unemployment; by 1936 some 130,000 men were employed directly and 270,000 indirectly in industries like cement mixing and stone masonry. Construction workers, living under a military-like regimen, were housed in isolated camps near the work sites.

The autobahns of the 1930s amounted to beautiful works of civil engineering. They blended organically into the landscape; it was said that those who constructed them had a real concern for the environment. Autobahns were built not to disturb scenery and landscape unnecessarily, and they were designed to contribute to the driver’s appreciation of the natural surroundings.

Maybe not as innovative as I once wrote! The New Yorker article mentions the busloads of German engineers traveling though New Jersey and New York to the mid-1930s learning about the road there and in New York. They took with them back to Germany state highways maps, plans for cloverleafs, and blueprints given to them by New York planners Robert Moses. More to the point, the article states that one astute observer saw many "German imitations of the cloverleaf crossing near Woodbridge, Nw Jersey, on U.S. 1, which was the first in the country. Also, there's a stretch between Nuremberg and Berlin that's a dead steal from a stretch along N.J. 2 that runs from Newark up toward the New York state line.

Why did American visitors to Germany who traveled there in the 1930s think that the autobahn were so original and innovative? According to the source quoted in the article it was because no one was on them, so they appeared so efficient. Compared to the daily traffic on U.S. 1 in New Jersey they were.